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Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Writers are creating all the time, but we make invisible
worlds. Once the notebook is closed, the book shut, there is nothing physical
to hold up and say, ‘I made that!’ So it’s not surprising that writers often
relish physically productive pursuits, the making of visible things. This was
one of many sources of satisfaction for me last week, when I took part in a
pop-up pop-up: a temporary production line of ten apprentices, making actual
pop-up books.

The whole book, and the factory/performance (we were ogled by the
visiting public as we worked) were designed by the artist Hilary Powell, who has been working in and on the Lea Valley in
East London for years. The book is called Legend: an A-Z of the Lea Valley, and
gives an alternative history of the area, from first manned flight to the Olympic
developments, in the form of images and beautiful, complex pop-ups.

Apprentices learning

Hilary put together a group of workers with amazingly
diverse skills – biochemists, artists, architects, geographers, librarians (and
a writer) – and somehow or other we made it happen. The pink coats helped, of
course.

I make a pop-up junction

We spent one day at the wonderful London Centre for Book Arts, being taught stitching and binding
techniques by the meticulous Simon (check their website for courses, I’d highly
recommend them). Then one day figuring out how to actually build a book from
piles of laser cut sheets of paper. And then we were off.

We used a lot of glue

The last day was a frenzy, but working so hard on something
so beautiful was profoundly satisfying. I didn’t notice that my knees wouldn’t
bend anymore until some time later. Having endured a hailstorm, and an extremely leaky roof, we finished our51st pop-up book at 10.30pm on
Saturday, surrounded by the launch party.

The pop-up factory in full swing

Here are a few images of the finished article. It is
beautiful, unique, and very special to me because I know all the amazing people
who helped to make it.

P is for Pylon

A pop-up pile of cars

Paper buildings that will never be demolished

Thanks again to Hilary Powell for such a wonderful idea
and for bringing us all together to make her book. Inspiration may lead to some
pop-up papercuts...

Wednesday, 10 September 2014

Last week I was reminded that the internet can, like the
best technology, be a great tool – a means to another end, and a creative one.

On Tuesday morning, a poet in Bolivar, Missouri (USA), went searching
online for poems. His search terms must have been awfully specific, but nothing
to do with poetry, because he found himself reading a blog post of mine from
October 2011 (here) – nearly three
years old, and my blog is hardly high profile. In the post I described an art
installation I’d seen at Spitalfields market, London, of bees suspended inside
a glass box. This creative person took a sentence of mine and reshaped it to
make a poem.

I can have a little flutter when I report that he described
the sentence as ‘so finely crafted’ that he was inspired to make a poem of it.
To be honest, in its original setting, my sentence was pretty overblown, but as
a poem I rather like it. The poet in question, Todd Sukany, sent it to me
because he planned to use it with his students, and he has returned permission
for me to publish his poem/my sentence here:

POLLINATING NOTHING

Of course the bees are dead,

but they also look it -

light, empty, dulled,

and thus not at all

evocative of a living swarm,

heaving this way and that,

laden with pollen or rage

or both,

and buzzing us out of their busy way.

- Todd Sukany 3 Sept 2014

There is something very gratifying for a prose writer, to
have your words taken up by a poet, who
generally takes such care over such things. This put me in mind of a series of
conversations I’ve been having with Tania Hershman, a consummate writer of flash fiction, who has recently turned to
poetry, and very successfully too. There is a whole ocean of possibility between
prose and poetry. Much flash fiction can be read as prose-poetry, and there is
a big blurred area of overlap between the two. Certainly, one can restructure a
piece of prose on the page to resemble a poem and it will work just as well,
but differently. It is possible to present the same piece of work as flash fiction,
prose-poetry, or a poem, and all will be valid.

Even in definite prose-land, readers will often describe reading
a short story as closer to the experience of engaging with a poem than a novel,
since it requires concentration, repeated reading, and consideration of every
word, symbol, nuance (if it’s a good one). But the shorter a prose story gets, the
closer it gets to poetry, as the significance of each word and its position
grows as it proportionally takes up more of its context. When I need to
refocus, and improve, my prose, there is nothing better than a dose of poetry
to do this.

Since the first words I ever had published also happened to
be a prose poem about bees, I thought I would give it another airing. It
appeared in a beautiful exhibition catalogue for John Stark’s Apiculture
paintings at the Charlie Smith gallery in London in 2011 (which I wrote about
on this blog here). I wrote in response to looking at John’s paintings in his
studio, and together we edited and rejigged the words until we had something we
felt would work with his visual art:

Theirs is the model. We only follow, whispering the spell of
calm, stilling the brilliant air. We study the hum, the drone, the comb.

We take just enough. The Shepherd guides us in this; he will
lead the dance when it comes. In the vision he will eat comb straight from the
hive, golden honey will coat his lips, his tongue, and his cheeks. His honeyed
eyes will see colours we have never known; the world will be a kaleidoscope of
gold.

Already he feels the drone in his bones. He shows us where
to tend each day. Our homes are ready for them, our palaces fit for gold-fed
queens. We will serve, and that will be enough.

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.